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A whole year has passed since I dusted off the computer and shared my poker experiences with the community. The main reason I haven’t chose to share is simple, bad play. It’s easy to write when you’re winning but damn near impossible to recap your losses when you have no financial reason to share your downfall.

After a quick and disappointing Colossus at the 2016 World Series of Poker ( QQ<KK ) I came back to California with no desire to play poker at a competitive level. I played one local tournament and became an early chipleader, but my erratic play lead to a fiery bustout before the first break. I knew then that I needed a break from the grind. If I continued to play, I would of lost every cent and bitcoin to my name, plus more.

At first all I did was watch movies and TV shows on the couch and eat. I was depressed a little but not to the extent I was sick, just a little sad. I devoted my entire adult life to a game that I no longer had a desire to be part of, it was tough to accept, but relaxing was easy. I stored away all my poker books, closed my poker training accounts, and withdrew any funds I had online.

During all of this I rediscovered my love for video games, but not playing them, collecting them. I couldn’t really fall in love with playing any game other poker, I probably never will, but all of a sudden I had that passion again. Instead of waking up early to hit the Casino on Saturdays I was at garage sales, thrift stores, or searching online for deals on retro video games. I was successful buying and selling video games and on top of it I had zero stress. During this time I would repeat a saying I heard somewhere a while back “if your smart enough to beat poker, what else could you be smart enough to beat? ”

This went on for months but from time to time my friends or relatives would ask me about poker. They wanted to know how I was doing, keep in mind I’ve been playing poker since I was 17 and I’m 32 now, the last 15 years of my life have been devoted to poker. So I would tell them I was done. That I had found something that I was more interested in. But what I didn’t realize is that talking to these people and telling them my poker stories was slowly rekindling the flame.

One day I had a couple beers and grew some courage and played a small tournament online. To my surprise, I easily won it. It felt like I never took anytime off but I understood about variance and didn’t think much of the victory. A couple weeks later I played again and after a long heads up match won again! So now my mind was in it again but I was so used to not playing, I still didn’t want to jump back in.

It took the record breaking raise in price of Bitcoin to get me back in. One day I woke up to see everyone on Twitter in a frenzy talking about bitcoin and sure enough I logged into my wallet and found out my bitcoin bankroll was worth about 3 times more in value…

It is so rewarding to know all my past hard work playing low-limit poker tournaments for bitcoin is paying off and that I won more money NOT playing poker relaxing collecting video games. Life is a trip.